Team Fortress 2

Okay, so now you believe us about Half-Life. It's a masterpiece. The creme de la creme of first-person shooters. Well, it's about to be bettered. Team Fortress 2 is the second game to come from the boys at Valve, and from what we're being told, it's going to be superior in every way.

Team Fortress 2 is set to be the next level of multiplayer gaming. We know, until now everyone always thought co-op games were for wimps. But what's being promised here sounds so damned good that even we hardened, cynical journalists have been getting a bit moist and twitchy with anticipation. The best way to describe it is to think of something like WarGasm using Half-Life-style gameplay. More first-person war game than first-person shooter.

For a start there are going to be nine different character classes to choose from - infantrymen, spies, snipers, medics, etc - all with different looks, skills and roles. "That's one of the beauties of this game," says Doug Lombardi, product manager for the game. "If you play the spy, for instance, you're really not going to have any weaponry or anything like that, so basically you're going out and uncovering the 'fog of war'. Your job is to go and observe stuff and report back like, 'Hey they've got a stronghold over here on the south, stay away."'

If you don't have a platoon of friends to fall back on though, rest easy. The whole game can be played as a giant botmatch if necessary.
Then there are the weapons. 'There will be at least 12 new weapons," says Lombardi, "a lot of these are based on realistic late-20th century military weapons. So it'll be more like the automatic machine gun, the sniper rifles and the shotguns as opposed to the railguns and all that crazy stuff from Half-Life."

But what exactly do all these spies, snipers, infantrymen and so on get to do? Team Fortress 2's mission structure isn't story-based like Half-Life. Instead you have a choice of 20 maps set over four separate campaigns, from which you can dip into at will. "The first mission may be that you and your team have to escort the president or someone from point A to point B," explains Lombardi,
"and he might be in a jeep or a truck and you have to flank around him and get him across an outdoor level. The next might be taken from Saving Private Ryan where your troops have to get onto a beach from water craft and then take over a position."

In order to come up with the missions, the three-man team spent an entire weekend watching every war movie they could get their hands on, so expect lots of vaguely familiar 'homages' to appear.
There are plenty of other features such as the Commander role, where you get to watch from the sidelines issuing orders to your team. And there'll be plenty of vehicles including tanks, C-130 Hercules aircraft, APCs, jeeps and so on, all of which can be manipulated. And then there's the audio communication system that is supposed to take a sample of your voice and relay typed messages through your speakers.

We could go on, but we'll save the really detailed stuff for a larger preview in a few months' time. Suffice to say, we're excited, very excited.